When the Goons Show Up On Your Doorstep...by Paul Bonneau2.paulbx1 -+at+- dfgh.net

Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise

...what are you going to do?

Solzhenitsyn's The
Gulag Archipelago is a rather dreary book; and
truth be told, I am still working my way through it. However, in the
first chapter he's expressed some thoughts on the above problem. He
writes,

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living
beings in it... and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you:
"You are under arrest...."

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements
in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest
simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out
only: "Me? What for?".... [and later:] "It's a mistake! They'll set
things right!"

Solzhenitsyn later recognized the inadequacy of this response, penning
perhaps the most quoted footnote ever,

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things
have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night
to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive
and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass
arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of
the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs,
paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every
step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to
lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a
dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
... The Organs would quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and
transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed
machine would have ground to a halt!

OK, sure. That was Stalin's Soviet Union. But we don't have an
American gulag, eh?

Don't we? There are over
two million Americans in jail, most for no good reason; and
torture (in the form of prison rape) is an almost universal
management tool. In the courts, a fully informed jury is denied, voir dire
stacks the deck against you, and you can't even bring up
constitutional objections. It's even worse for anyone designated, on
the whim of the ruling class, an "enemy combatant". At some point (and
we are long past it here), the system drops its original mission and
becomes concerned only with supporting those working within it, by
consuming ever-larger numbers of victims. That is what the Gulag is
all about.

Well, perhaps it has not yet actually dropped its original mission.
Watching these two videos (especially the cop's), one gets the
impression that, however broken it may be, the system still works
pretty well at putting actual bad guys away. It may be more accurate
to say that the criminal justice system now has two distinct
functions: putting bad guys away, and putting freedom-lovers and
tyranny-resisters away. Not to mention, being a gigantic jobs program.

Unless you are in the habit of stealing cars or mugging little old
ladies, you should never see any cops on your doorstep, offering to
arrest you. What does it mean when you do?

It means you are the next prospective victim of the Gulag. It means
the next several years of your life, or perhaps your entire life, are
very likely gone. It means rape and other torture, AIDS, and a broken
life even if you do survive your term.

It means the system has, for its own inscrutable reasons, declared war
on you. And as Solzhenitsyn notes, "Me? What for?" is an absurdly
inadequate response to a declaration of war.

The proper response to a declaration of war, is a hail of bullets.

Well, what about the case where you are incorrectly accused of
something? What if it was just a simple mistake? Isn't the system
supposed to sort the actual bad guys from the good guys?

Yesand it probably still manages to do that now and then
(reinforcing the fantasy that "they'll set things right"). But what
are your chances of running into that kind of situation,
compared to the war scenario? Particularly if you are publicly
critical of tyranny, or a member of the class of undesireables
mentioned in documents like the
MIAC Report? Does the system "work", are things set
right, for political prisoners? Or is setting things right restricted
only to the function of putting actual bad guys away?

Setting things right for political prisoners would require such court
actions such as observing the Constitution. Good luck on that.

Has MIAC not perhaps generated a self-fulfilling prophecy, angering
and activating people who resent the slide into tyranny? Might not
that have been the intention all along, to help feed that Gulag? Who
wrote the MIAC report after allwas it not members of the Gulag?
Are these several recent mass shootings another part of that?

Life in this country is bound to get interesting shortly. If you need
a "pick-me-up" to help you adjust to the unpleasant new reality, I'd
advise getting Mark Spungin's book,
Neither
Predator Nor Prey.

What do you do when the goons show up on your doorstep? There are no
good answers here, but you still have free will. Think about this
problem, then exercise that free will if it happens.